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Important: Preamble before profits

Despite being a personal finance website and blog, I’ve hesitated to regularly provide specific earnings. Each time I’ve shared writing revenue — at 6 and 12 months — it’s taken me some time to deliberate whether I should. My revenue isn’t everything, and frankly, it’s been steadily declining since last summer. But while I made less revenue, I saw more traffic — the important metric to me.

Many personal finance blogs share their earnings on a regular, monthly basis with their readers. My fear in regularly doing so may come from an irrational place, but I worry that sharing this information is like eating junk food; the syrupy sweet taste goes down easily, but it has a vapid nutritional value. Last month, I decided to share those income stats and many readers liked seeing how the website was helping my financial goals. Hope these stats help in your own blogging/writing journey!

August 2014 — Blog income report

August was a rough month for earnings. Unfortunately, the continued slump and decline in earnings has not stopped. At one point in January and February of this year, I was making over $5000 per month from the site. Now, I’m lucky to be making over $500. It’s definitely changed how I budget for the future, and I wish there was something I could do to change the situation. Thankfully, my traffic continues to stay strong, along with social media growth. I crossed over 1,400 followers on Twitter, which is a tremendous milestone for me.

Here’s what my traffic stats looked like this month.

LinkOffers Affiliates $485 (Up $69 compared to last month)

Again, affiliate sales led for income. Buoyed by two credit cards, Barclaycard Arrival and US Airways, I saw a slight increase in earnings this month. Over the last few months, LinkOffers has steadily cut the commission on credit cards. Consequently, this is much of the reason why these numbers slumped since the beginning of the year. I have not been regularly advertising affiliate deals and links, which may also be contributing to the slide and stagnation of revenue. I have some work to do here.

Google AdSense $40.47 (Down $207 compared to last month)

Last month I had a hugely viral article that brought in hundreds of thousands of visitors. It was unreal. That spike in traffic artificially cause Google AdSense revenue to expand. Now, it’s back to more realistic values. This value tends to track around $50 per month. For August, I ended up moving an ad space to the beginning of articles to try to keep ads highly visible. Thus far, I’m not seeing any major revenue boost from this switch.

Amazon Associates $0.20 (Negligible change)

Somebody mentioned that Amazon’s Associates program may have taken a big dive due to the Smile program. This Amazon initiative encourages shoppers to choose a charity to support. By selecting one, a percentage of your purchases go to that charity. It’s a great program, but it looks like it may remove your referral link. This may be reducing any commission possibilities.

Forward-looking statements

Last month I mentioned that I’d like to begin reviewing books, films, and media that help diversify the conversation about personal finance. I decided to start with a super ambitious read called All the Presidents’ Bankers by Nomi Prins. I’m about halfway through this impressive tome of financial and banking history. Thus far, I’m loving it, and can’t wait to share it with you all! Likewise, I will be writing a review of a new documentary, Rich Hill. This film is about severe poverty in a small, midwestern town. Look forward to those soon.

As for revenue, I’m not working actively enough to change the financial situation each month. That’s something I need to work on. I’ll likely revamp and republish a couple articles on some of my favorite affiliate links.

Thanks for reading! If you’ve got questions, comments, or advice, I’d love to hear it below!

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Important: My preamble before profits

Despite being a personal finance website and blog, I’ve hesitated to regularly provide specific earnings. Each time I’ve shared writing revenue — at 6 and 12 months — it’s taken me some time to deliberate whether I should. My revenue isn’t everything, and frankly, it’s been steadily declining since last summer. But while I made less revenue, I saw more traffic — the important metric to me.

Many personal finance blogs share their earnings on a regular, monthly basis with their readers. My fear in regularly doing so may come from an irrational place, but I worry that sharing this information is like eating junk food; the syrupy sweet taste goes down easily, but it has a vapid nutritional value. Do public displays of revenue help those that follow this site? Would love your input!

While keeping these questions in mind, I’ve decided to write about last month’s earnings, analyze the data, and provide forward-looking goals. Hopefully, you can take this information and let it inspire you to reduce your debt and meet some of your own financial dreams. Maybe you’ll start a blog of your own!

July 2014 Income Report

This month I truly learned what it meant to have an article go viral. Shortly after publishing “Destroy The 40-Hour Workweek,” the site quickly received the most incredible response ever. Google Analytics data showed that there were over 221,000 pageviews because of this tremendous social networking surge. Obviously, the increased traffic affected my income for this month, too. Most of this is reflected in an incredible spike in Google AdSense earnings.

LinkOffers Affiliates $416.00 (Down $200 compared to last month)

Affiliate sales led the way. My most popular articles that lead to commissioned sales are the Barclaycard Arrival and US Airways credit cards. Unfortunately, sales have steadily declined in recent months; likely, due to a combination of search engine optimization (SEO) problems that were caused by server problems. Also, referral rates have been in decline, which means that each sale equaled fewer commissions.

Google AdSense $247.95 (Up $204.49 compared to last month)

As I mentioned earlier, Google AdSense had a huge spike in revenue that was largely attributable to my viral post. Click-through-rates did not change by much, but the surge led to more clicks and impressions. I recently added a couple videos to YouTube and used one of them in an article about moving from my old apartment. While miniscule, the ads on YouTube are contributing to my earnings.

Amazon Associates $1.13 (Negligible change)

There’s not much to say here. Amazon Associates is one of the most flexible and user-friendly affiliate networks. Moreover, it pays a fair amount for each item sold. When I linked to TurboTax during the tax season, I actually made about $200. But since then, it’s been pretty stagnant.

Total July 2014 Earnings: $665.08

Forward-looking statements

My main goal in starting this site was always focused on building a network and traffic stream. Money wasn’t the main motivator. But revenue from this website has changed my life forever. It’s given me an incredible lift in mood and gives me an outlet to share my thoughts. I’m truly honored to have visitors and followers. Your contributions fueled me to write more than I ever thought would be possible.

Going forward, I want to build on my fundamental desire for traffic. I’d like to increase subscribers via email (please sign up!), more frequently engage with Twitter followers, and find ways to integrate Facebook with the site. Whatever money follows would be a wonderful thing, but hardly the sole, motivating factor to this site.

The other piece that I want to begin including on Frugaling are book reviews. Anything that has to do with money, finance, and stock markets, I want to review and share with you. Hopefully, it can be a quick way for you to stay informed about complicated financial matters and offer me an opportunity to do something I love: read.

Thanks for viewing my report. If you have any recommendations, questions, or comments, please leave them below. I love nothing more than helping another person make their goals come true! Best of luck!

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Late Sunday night I published an article about work in America. More specifically, how the 40-hour workweek harms productivity, the environment, and psychological health. The next day, I woke up to find over 50 people on my website. And then something crazy happened.

After my article was published, it was shared on the social networking site Reddit. Currently, it’s the 53rd most visited site on the net. The users of Reddit tend to be more tech savvy and interested in social issues (but isn’t limited to these areas). My article struck a chord with people that support the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and workers’ rights.

I decided to go over to Starbucks yesterday to complete some academic research, as my site was beginning to launch into a mad frenzy of traffic. In my typical frugal fashion, I had a reward and even got another free refill before I left! I was buzzed by the caffeine, but even more because of the analytics. Hell, I couldn’t concentrate on the research writing because the numbers started to grow.

Suddenly, it hit the hundreds. OWS supporters shared it on Facebook and the niche social site, Hacker News. I texted a couple friends and let my mom know what was happening. Mom hopped on the site, and I could see her individual visit. That’s the last time I could see a person’s click.

I began to tweet out progressively higher traffic statistics, which came from free Google Analytics. When I hit 200, I looked back at Reddit. A big-time user and moderator of one of the largest “subreddits” had shared my article on no less than three other boards. The über popular “Futurology” subreddit generally has thousands of visitors at any one moment. That’s when I could tell it was all about to rollover into the most popular article I’ve ever written.

From there, the article rocketed to the top of five major boards and was shared on Facebook nearly 2000 times. I kept watching the traffic — still ticking higher. It was like gambling or playing a videogame, except I couldn’t lose. The real-time traffic statistics constantly updated every second, and the visitors didn’t stop.

Every time I thought I had hit the max number of visitors at one time, it went up even further. I thought it would all stop before 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, and 1,000. But it didn’t. The highest recorded real-time, active visitors clocked in at 1,212 (see the screenshot above), with my web server straining to handle one more person.

I struggled to get to sleep because the traffic was still in the 900s by Monday night. When I finally began to drift, I assumed that the number would be back to more reasonable levels in the morning. I thought, “Maybe it’ll be around 100 or so?”

Surprise surprise, that wasn’t the case. When I woke up around 9 AM, the site was still reaching about 900 people — 150-200 visitors per minute. The stress on my server hadn’t ceased and my site was still inaccessible for much of the morning.

I was shocked by the total amount of traffic that was driven to my site over two days. Despite being a nerd through much of my life, I had no real appreciation for the level of traffic available on the Internet. After two days, my site has received about 200,000 visitors (probably more than that, due to tracking and server issues). That’s roughly three times the population size of my adopted home, Iowa City.

I was lucky to be able to share this experience with Twitter followers, friends, and family. As a writer, it put a serious smile on my face that people cared that much to read and share my work. I’m deeply honored and humbled by the magnitude of support. Thanks for your support by sharing the article and reading all about it!